#ooooooh.... gonna have to let this one simmer in my brain and get back to you about the mind meld thing

[rocketbirdie]

WAIT I JUST HAD A THOUGHT mako addict Kunsel who’s looking for Zack (thinking he’s dead and in the lifestream, hoping he’s not) but accidentally finds Cloud (comatose/catatonic due to his own mako poisoning) instead, and finds them while Zack is on the run by getting directions from Cloud when he hits and meets up with him in the pseudo-lifestream

I’m not explaining this super well but what I’m picturing is Kunsel shoots up in his room at ShinRa and thinks about Zack so hard while he’s high that he accidentally makes like. Mana-to-mana contact with Cloud’s semi-attached soul while he’s still floating in a tank in Nibelheim and when Kunsel sobers up, because he’s so obsessed with finding Zack and has only hit dead ends up till now, he grabs the “lead” with both hands and straight up deserts to trek across the continents in search of that lab that he only briefly got to see, and vaguely at that. (He mostly was stuck on having seen Zack in the next tank over, scratching into the glass with… claws?)

And over the course of Kunsel’s trek, Zack breaks himself and Cloud out of the lab and goes on his own trek to Midgar, unaware that Cloud and Kunsel are (kind of) in contact. So Kunsel keeps shooting up while he travels, Cloud is still poisoned and has an estranged soul-to-body relationship right now, and they both kind of figure out after a while that they can sort of… not communicate, but Kunsel can impress his desperation to find Zack into Cloud and Cloud can send back his own impressions of where Zack is taking them through at any moment

And because Kunsel keeps shooting up and intentionally stretching his soul thin to reach Cloud, eventually his body kind of gives out on him a little bit and he stops needing as much mako to reach Cloud, and while he assumes this means he’s closer to them than before, really it just kind of means he’s unintentionally becoming a little like Cloud 😬 hazy focus, absence seizures, bog standard mako overdose effects. But they’re helping him find Zack and Cloud!! So they can’t be that bad, right?

Can’t figure out how to bridge the actual finding part of this but I think after they’re all together again Kunsel would be so so grateful to Cloud for helping him find Zack that he builds up a pedestal for Cloud in his mind the way he’s built one up for Zack :) so now Cloud has TWO strong scary SOLDIERs doting on his every whim :)

I think with this au it would actually be Cloud who is more apathetic to Kunsel at first, because while it’s obviously a good thing for Zack to have more devotees, Cloud didn’t really know Kunsel that well before everything… so where it’s awe-inspiring to have Zack be so protective of him, when Kunsel does it it’s at first kind of… uncomfortable… but hell, he learns really fast and he doesn’t seem at all fazed by Cloud’s apathy or Zack’s new mutations or either of their absentminded bloodlust, in fact in that last one he kind of fits right in with them both. And Zack trusts him a lot. So maybe he’s not that bad?

I want to work the mind meld into this somehow but I can’t make it click :( it feels like it could be so INTUITIVE but I can’t make it work :( maybe you have a better way??

ooOUUGH...... poor kunsel burning through his own health for the sake of these two...